The population of Beersheba about 6000 was entirely Palestinian, including sedentary or semi-sedentary beduin: the population of the Beersheba district was about 110,000, almost all driven out of their villages and the town itself.

Dalia KARPEL: "'A story of survival and rebirth' The Palestinians Who Didn't Flee During the Nakba" (Haaretz, Sept 19, 2017): click here!

When he was in the fourth grade in elementary school in the Arab town of Majd al-Krum in Upper Galilee, Adel Manna took part in the preparations to celebrate Israel’s 10th Independence Day.

The National Library’s photo collections include two albums whose pictures were produced at the end of the 19th century using the process known as photochrom. What was this method and why do the photos resemble oil paintings more than the black-and-white originals?

In contrast to what Benny Morris claimed, Adel Manna's 'Nakba and Survival' is an inspiring book, noteworthy for its methodical approach in presenting a credible, multifaceted history of the Palestinian tragedy of 1948.

Early members of the Zionist movement and later Israelis have consistently attempted to control the narrative of the conflict with the Palestinians, including by seizing photographic evidence of Palestine and the Palestinians' history.

Stuart LITTLEWOOD: "The Balfour Declaration: Time to say sorry. Time we made amends" (Redress Information & Analysis, July 23, 2017): click here!

In a letter to a local newspaper about Brexit and the way Prime Minister Theresa May is handling it, I happened to mention in passing the Balfour Declaration, criticising her plans to celebrate the centenary “with pride” and invite Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to the fun.

A young fellow tied to a tree and set on fire. A woman and an old man shot in back. Girls lined up against a wall and shot with a submachine gun. The testimonies collected by filmmaker Neta Shoshani about the massacre in Deir Yassin are difficult to process even 70 years after the fact.

Norman Bentwich was the chief legal officer with the British administration in Jerusalem between the two world wars. A committed Zionist, he drafted many of the ordinances that enabled Jewish settlers to seize land which indigenous Palestinians had farmed for generations.

Palestinian photos and films seized by Israeli troops have been gathering dust in the army and Defense Ministry archives until Dr. Rona Sela, a curator and art historian, exposed them. The material presents an alternative to the Zionist history that denied the Palestinians’ existence here, she says.

Abou Omar is a Palestinian refugee who lived in Yarmouk camp in Syria before fleeing the country when the war broke out. Laila Ben Allal interviews him on becoming a refugee once again in Greece, and the incredible journey he made to get there.

17 June marks the anniversary of the execution of three of the earliest martyrs of the Palestinian prisoners’ movement – Fouad Hijazi, Atta al-Zeer and Mohammed Khalil Jamjoum – by British colonial occupiers, in Akka prison.The execution of these Palestinian strugglers has remained for years an ongoing story of resistance.

In June 1967, I was 12 years old. I recall helping to fill sandbags to fortify the entrance to our home in Haifa in preparation for war. The army was already geared towards war and official Israel terrified its society and supporters around the world, as Zionist leaders did in 1948, with warnings of another Holocaust.

The Palestinian cause today has in some respects reverted to where it stood before the 1967 War. It is worth retracing this trajectory to understand how we reached the current situation, and derive insights on where to go from here.

Haaretz’s Jerusalem correspondent covered the story of the city’s unification in the wake of the Six-Day War. Fifty years later he revisits the the dramatic decision that changed the face of the Middle East.

As Palestinians marked on Monday 69 years since the beginning of the Nakba -- or “catastrophe” -- officials and activists denounced the human rights violations Palestinians have endured since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

May 15, 2017 marks the 69th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist paramilitaries, and subsequently Israeli forces, made 750,000 to one million indigenous Palestinians into refugees to establish a Jewish-majority state in Palestine.

Israel has resorted to three main strategies to suppress Palestinian calls for justice and human rights, including the Right of Return for refugees. One is dedicated to rewriting history; another attempts to distract from present realities altogether and a third aims at reclaiming the Palestinian narrative as essentially an Israeli one.

Mondoweiss Editors: "‘Why do I not cry out for the right of return?’ — an exchange between Uri Avnery and Salman Abu Sitta" (Mondoweiss, April 21, 2017 ): click here!

Uri Avnery is a co-founder of the Israeli “peace bloc”, Gush Shalom, a former Knesset member and a journalist. In his youth, he was a member of the paramilitary group the Irgun, known for its terrorist attacks on Palestinians and the British Mandate authorities.

Maryam NABBOUT: "Palestine's annual Nakba march is blocked by Israel for the first time ever" (Step Feed, April 10, 2017 ): click here!

For Palestinians, Yawm El Nakba or the "day of catastrophe," refers to Israel's creation after "hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were depopulated and destroyed in 1948."

Jonathan COOK: "Why is Israel afraid of the Nakba's March of Return?" (Al-Jazeera, April 10, 2017 ): click here!

For the first time, Israeli police block the annual march to commemorate the Palestinian 'catastrophe' of 1948.

Donna NEVEL: "What We Talk About When We Don’t Talk About The Nakba" (Forward, March 29, 2017 ): click here!

In recent weeks, I have been paying particular attention to the arguments in favor of Zionism from those who call themselves progressive Zionists and call for a two-state solution, support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and express criticism of some of Israel’s policies and actions. More precisely, I have been paying attention to what is NOT being discussed in these arguments, namely, anything about the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), the expulsion of approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and land before and during Israel’s creation. If we are talking about Zionism, then we are also necessarily talking about the Nakba.

Early in the morning of April 9, 1948, commandos of the Irgun (headed by Menachem Begin) and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin, a village with about 750 Palestinian residents. The village lay outside of the area to be assigned by the United Nations to the Jewish State.

Robert FISK: "Theresa May wants British people to feel 'pride' in the Balfour Declaration. What exactly is there to be proud of?" (Independent, March 2, 2017): click here!

Balfour initiated a policy of British support for Israel which continues to this very day, to the detriment of the occupied Palestinians of the West Bank and the five million Palestinian refugees living largely in warrens of poverty around the Middle East, including Israeli-besieged Gaza. Surely we should apologise

Fathi NEMER: "Finders Keepers in the Holy Land: So who was there first?" (Mondoweiss, Feb 2, 2017): click here!

2017 will undoubtedly be a critical year for Palestine. We are standing at the crossroads of many different possibilities that could have serious implications for the future of the area.

No one in Umm al-Hiran believes Yakub Musa Abu al-Kiyan, a father of 13, intentionally ran over a police officer; residents remember his calls against violence: 'Let them demolish the house, only let no one be hurt.'

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) soldier and medic Elor Azaria, who was filmed last March (by Imad Abu Shamsiya, a Palestinian B’Tselem volunteer) executing an incapacitated Palestinian man, Fattah al-Sharif, in cold blood has been convicted of manslaughter. He is now the modern Israeli hero, “the child of all of us” as many Israelis refer to him.

Our topic is of course the so-called “conflict” in Israel-Palestine, a tragedy that has dragged on for so long that it feels static, indeed almost normalised. But unlike other deadly conflicts, this one is wholly in our power to stop—“our” meaning the United States and Europe. It is in our power to stop it, because we are the ones empowering it.

Only nonviolent resistance of Palestinians to their prolonged ordeal and transnational civil society activism seem to have any capacity to exert positive change to the status quo.

David SHULMAN: "Palestine: The End of the Bedouins?" (The New York Review of Books, Dec 7, 2016): click here!

One way to tell the story of the Middle East as a whole is to describe the endemic struggle between peripatetic nomads and settled peasant farmers—a struggle attested already in ancient Mesopotamian documents.

Ninety-nine years after it was written, the British document supporting the formation of a 'national home for the Jewish people' is back in the news. But it caused unrest among some British Jews at the time, too.

If Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour passes over the perimeter of her home’s driveway in her village of Reineh in the Galilee, an alarm will sound at the British multinational security firm G4S and the Israeli authorities will be alerted. Israeli police arrested Tatour in the early hours of October 11, 2015 for her poem, “Qawem ya sha‘abi qawemhum” (Resist My People, Resist Them), which was posted to her YouTube account earlier that month. On November 2, Israel charged her with incitement to violence and support for a terrorist organization.

A good historian always examines his conclusions. If he comes to the conclusion that things he wrote previously require a reassessment, he is obligated to face that. But a historian who, at the start of his career, determined that Israel is responsible for the mass flight of the Palestinians in 1948 and later changed his views until he became the darling of the settler right, is a pathetic phenomenon. Benny Morris has followed that path.

Winston Churchill quipped at the House of Commons in 1948, “For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history”.

Israeli practices and policies are a combination of apartheid, military occupation, and colonization. This regime is not limited to the Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but it also targets Palestinians residing on the Israeli side of the 1949 Armistice Line, as well as those living in forced exile.

Oral history has a long precedent in Arab and Palestinian culture that stems from a broader oral tradition. 1 In the years immediately following the Nakba of 1948 the Arab tradition of the hakawati (storyteller) was used, according to Nur Masalha, to shore up a defense against erasure of culture and memory among Palestinians.

If Mr. Netanyahu really wants to know what ethnic cleansing means, he should ask the Palestinian citizens of Israel. 85% of the Palestinians living in what is now Israel were forced out in the 1948 Nakba - just because they weren't Jews.

"The dynamiting of Palestine" (Crimes of Britain, August 27, 2016): click here!

Throughout the Arab uprising of 1936-39 the British used collective punishment against the Palestinian people. The destruction of property was central to British military repression in Palestine, such tactics are today used by the colonial settler state that the British paved the way for.

"The Genocide of the Palestinian People: An International Law and Human Rights Perspective" (Center for Constitutional Rights, Aug 25, 2016): click here!

While there has been recent criticism of those taking the position that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, there is a long history of human rights scholarship and legal analysis that supports the assertion. Prominent scholars of the international law crime of genocide and human rights authorities take the position that Israel’s policies toward the Palestinian people could constitute a form of genocide.

A central and enduring consequence of the Nakba has been the near-total ban on the entry to Israel of Palestinian Arab refugees who lost their homes in 1948. The exclusion of non-Jewish immigration from neighboring Arab countries is also taken for granted as an enabling condition of Zionism. The systematic exclusion of Arab migration from Israel/Palestine, however, did not begin in 1948. Instead, it is rooted in specific understandings of race and nationality enshrined in the international legal agreements that laid the framework for the colonial state of the British Mandate of Palestine, the state inherited by the Zionist movement.

My paternal grandparents were expelled from their homeland in the 1948 Palestinian Nakba. Absence has since been embroidered in the fabric of what came to be a family born in a memory of an unattainable land.

PR: "The Supreme Court permits the transfer of a library and archaeological artifacts from the Rockefeller Museum to West Jerusalem after rejecting an appeal by the Emek Shaveh organization" (Emek Shaveh, July 21, 2016: click here!

...The Supreme Court decided to turn down the appeal, claiming that the Antiquities Authority is licensed to transfer them from Rockefeller museum to West Jerusalem. The Supreme Court further claimed that the Israeli law in East Jerusalem overrides international law, which prohibits the removal of cultural property from occupied territories.

The Nakba dispossesses Palestinians: not only of land and territory, but also at the level of political discourse. Since the establishment of the state of Israel, the country’s judiciary has worked to constrict the space for Palestinian political activity – both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary – through various methods.

Israel is concealing vital records to prevent darkest periods in its history from coming to light, academics say.

Natasha ROTH: "Wiping Palestinian history off the map in Jaffa" (+972, June 4, 2016): click here!

A tourist map of Jaffa presents a reimagined, Zionist version of the city: Jaffa 2.0 is a boutique neighborhood of Tel Aviv, with a smattering of ‘local’ (read: native) color. But the map itself simply represents a much broader process of destruction and reconstruction.

In mid-May, when Israeli Jews celebrate Independence Day, Palestinians commemorate the Nakba — the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of people from cities and villages across Palestine that began in December 1947 and intensified throughout 1948, both before and after the declaration of the State of Israel.

Thousands marched last week to commemorate the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Held in the southern Naqab (Negev) region for the first time in 19 years, the 2016 March of Return is being hailed as the largest such event for Palestinians living inside present-day Israel. Organized by the Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced, the 12 May protest emphasized that the Nakba — Arabic for catastrophe — continues today.

This text describes the discourse on the Nakba — mostly the concept but also the historical event — in Israel. When did it appear? When did it decline and was repressed? What caused these changes? The attempt here is to describe historical moments, a periodization, from the founding of the state until today, in order to describe the relation to the term in each period and the changes it went through

Sixty-eight years after the occupation of Palestine began people refer to the Zionist rape and pillaging of Palestine as a “conflict.” It is the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” or the Israeli Palestinian “Issue” some even call it a “dispute” and others, a “question.”

Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people seems indeed relentless. The gloves have come off, the masquerade of the peace talks is finally seen by most as a futile waste of time, as Israel bares its unadorned face as an expansionist settler-colonial state. Thus the new deputy foreign minister recently declared “this land is ours. All of it is ours,” while a growing number of Israeli politicians finally acknowledge what Palestinians have been saying for years: it is apartheid.

The Nakba – From 1948 to Today – is an article specially commissioned by Palestine Solidarity Campaign. This article is part of the resources produced as part of the "PSC Nakba Week 2016 www.palestinecampaign.org/nakbaweek" and is included in our Nakba Week Resource Pack.

Jonathan COOK: "A history of silencing Israeli army whistleblowers – from 1948 until today" (Mondoweiss, March 23, 2016)): click here!

Israel’s politicians hoped then that the Palestinians could be quickly terrorised from their lands. Decades later, the atrocities continue – and to the same end. But Israel must face facts: the days when such systematic brutality could be kept under wraps are now over.

...the real question when it comes to Israel (and every other national polity for that matter) is under what specific legal and moral conditions — both in relation to its geographical neighbors and all those subject to its forms of organized power — can and should be permitted and/or encouraged to perpetuate its present modes of existence?

A new book examines the ways in which Israel’s policies of displacement in the Negev are also drastically changing the environment where hundreds of thousands live.- The desert was never empty, but it was emptied of an estimated 90 percent of its Bedouin inhabitants between 1948 and 1953 in what the authors term the “Bedouin Nakba.” This involved massacres and widespread destruction of livestock and property.

Jonathan OFIR: "The Tantura massacre of 1948 and the academic character assassination of Teddy Katz" (Mondoweiss, March 3, 2016)): click here!

The Tantura massacre in May 1948, committed by Haganah forces just days after the declaration of the State of Israel, is not only one of the worst massacres of 1948, but its cover-up is also, in itself, a story, showing us just how effective silence can be in obscuring crimes against humanity.

Noga Kadman is a licensed Israeli tour guide. She is also the author of a book, based on her masters thesis, that tells us about each and every one of the 418 Palestinian villages depopulated in 1948 in order to make Israel a Jewish country.

Walid KHALIDI: "Before Their Diaspora. A photographic history of the Palestinians, 1876-1948" (Digital Edition, Institute for Palestine Studies): click here!

“There was no battle and no resistance (and no Egyptians). The first conquerors killed from eighty to a hundred Arabs [including] women and children. The children were killed by smashing of their skulls with sticks. Is it possible to shout about Deir Yassin and be silent about something much worse?” For the first time ever, a letter quoting one of the Israeli soldiers who were part of the Al-Dawayima massacre in October 1948 is published in full.

The British accepted the idea that Jews were not merely a religiously defined people, but an ethnically defined people. As opposed to this, they regarded the local Palestinian population under one ethnic-linguistic term: Arabs – despite Palestinian religious diversity, dialect and traditions, which differ from other Arabs.

They set out to stab or run people over by car because they’re conquerors. They set out to kill their conquerors. They chose violence as a means of resisting a more pernicious violence, that of the occupation. They wanted to hurt Israelis, especially soldiers and settlers, because of the occupation, not because they’re Jewish. Their Jewishness has nothing to do with it. For the Palestinians, there’s no difference between a soldier who’s Jewish, Druze or Bedouin and a settler from the tribe of Menashe... The thought that dozens of Palestinians have already set out to commit spontaneous acts of stabbing or car-ramming, with hundreds, maybe thousands or tens of thousands considering doing the same, should have provoked some thinking in Israel. Not the thinking of a victim who is being attacked again, but a consideration of what drives desperate children and adults to do this, in the knowledge that their chances of survival are slim. But this might only raise questions that Israelis run away from as is from a fire.

When ISIS militias swept into Mosel, Iraq, in June 2014, Ibrahim Mahmoud plotted his flight, along with his whole family, which included 11 children. Once upon a time, Ibrahim was himself a child escaping another violent campaign carried out by equally angry militias.

"Israel as a state and society is premised on the destruction of the history and living society of the Palestinian Arab people and the effacement of the multiple histories of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea for most of the last 1,400 years - since the Muslim conquest of the Byzantine province of Palæstina in 640".

A rarely told story of the 1948 war that founded Israel concerns Nazareth’s survival. It is the only Palestinian city in what is today Israel that was not ethnically cleansed during the year-long fighting. Other cities, such as Jaffa, Lydd, Ramleh, Haifa and Acre, now have small Palestinian populations that mostly live in ghetto-like conditions in what have become Jewish cities. Still others, like Tiberias and Safad, have no Palestinians left in them at all.

The covert alliance between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Zionist entity of Israel should be no surprise to any student of British imperialism. The problem is the study of British imperialism has very few students.

Palestine recognized Israel's right to exist in 1988, but Israel's government is asking Palestinians to deny the existence of our people and the horrors that befell us in 1948.

William James MARTIN: "The Deir Yassin Massacre" (Counterpunch, May 13, 2004): click here!

On April 9, 1948, members of the underground Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, or IZL, led by Menachem Begin, who was to become the Israeli prime minister in 1977, entered the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin, massacred 250 men, women, children and the elderly, and stuffed many of the bodies down wells.

Gideon LEVY: "So These Are Israel's New Heroes?"Israel's recent military operations in Palestinian hospitals are a blatant violation of the Geneva Convention, and make you wonder how low the country can sink (Haaretz, Nov 21, 2015).

Noam SHEIZAF: "Jerusalem, in context"(+972, October 19, 2015). "The current events in Jerusalem have a political history and context. Attempts to attribute the violence to some kind of Palestinian pathology while ignoring other factors is a recipe for making things worse."